Yesterday I had a deep conversation with my eldest son about League of Legends. I must admit I am not fully comfortable with him spending countless hours playing this online game. What I did not understood until yesterday was the profound undergoing digital transformation that the entertainment industry is experiencing as we speak.

If you think League of Legends is just an online game and its creator Riot Games are just a game publishing company, you are as wrong as I was. Let me try to explain what wonder me most by doing an analogy with football (i.e. soccer for those few reading in the U.S.)

More than hundred years ago, all around the world there were the football players playing football matches in the football field, and there were also the supporters in the stadium’s bleachers attending the matches. Local leagues of football teams organized local championships, regional federations organized regional cups and, then less than hundred years ago, the worldwide federation, also known as FIFA, organized the worldwide cup in my home town. Bribery and scandals aside, football is a multibillion dollars business, isn’t it?

About seven years ago, Riot Games developed and published League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena, real-time strategy video game, very popular among teenagers from 12 to 19 years old. There were teams of five online gamers teams playing games against other teams eventually in opposites sides of the world in real time. These gamers are actually gamethletes, a skill-based ranked community of people all around the world, who love to play this online game. There are local championships, regional championships, and there is the worldwide championship. The topmost ranked gametheletes are actually professional players who get paid for playing. Amazing, uh? Well, not really. The Messis, the Suarezes, and the Neymars of the football are paid, and very well I must say, for playing the sport they love to play, aren’t them?

Who pays the League of Legend’s gametheltes? Riot Games does for most of them and teams participating in the Worldwide Championship are even sponsored by brands like Samsung or SK Telecom. How Riot Games makes money to pay them? Well, you can get almost everything, and go almost everywhere in the game without a penny, but money can make things go faster. Just by playing games you earn points, and then you use those points for stuff like costumes for creatures in the game. But you can also buy points. And before you ask, yes, my credit card number is somewhere inside Riot Games’ datacenters; somewhere deep inside, hopefully.

But here’s where things become even more interesting. The 2014 League of Legends Worldwide Championship final was played at the Sangam Stadium, also known as the Seoul World Cup Stadium, built for the FIFA’s World Cup in Korea in 2002. About 40 thousand people attended the 2014 League of Legends finals live and companies paid for advertising spaces on the stadium, yet another 27 million watched them live online via streaming served by 40 broadcasters who also paid for the content. I don’t know how much they paid, but winning teams raised about 2.13 million dollars in prizes, so there should be good business case, shouldn’t?

The game’s user interface layout used for broadcasting is similar but different to the game layout used to play against other teams: it needs to show the full battlefield, not just the portion your team controls, and needs to show both teams’ actions. But it also allows space for advertising, so that’s how the broadcasters makes money.

My analogy with football isn’t about the sport, it’s about the entertainment industry. And there’s this multi-million dollars business of online multiplayer gaming, of which League of Legends is just one of them, mainly for teenagers who don’t have money, run by relatively few people, that enables a huge ecosystem for others to make money too, including those content generator teenagers who record their games and publish them online on YouTube or broadcast them on Twitch and get paid for it because other teenager consumers do watch them.

Putting it simply, that’s pretty similar to the business model behind the entertainment industry, isn’t it? And it’s fully digital. And it took just seven years to get there.

Software is pervasive. Except perhaps for the one-man (or women) burrito-like shops in the streets, every business runs on software. And they are an exception if and only if they do not accept credit card payments or use online grocery delivery services to refill their raw materials stock. Every company is a software company at the end of the day, either a software-consumer only or a software-development-and-consumer combo.

For those enterprises that do in-house software development and then use that software to run their business, even if it is just a portion of the total software being used, the traditional software development lifecycle might not be appropriate in some circumstances, as we will see in a minute.

An for those enterprises who’s business is to develop software for other enterprises or individuals to consume, the traditional software development lifecycle might not be appropriate either.

By traditional software development lifecycle I do mean the process that creates a software product at the end. I do not care if it is waterfall or is agile, the only thing that matters me is that a software product is created as a result of that process. It has the following characteristics:

Many features. Differentiation of the product is based on having as many features as possible for as wide an audience as possible. Products are rarely targeted to specific roles or customer needs.

Mean time to failure. As with traditional manufactured products, its main focus is mean-time-to-failure: products are better if they have few failures.

Slow update peace. Software product updates are relatively uncommon; it may be through patches for fixing bugs, through service packs to add new functionality, or through entire new versions. And development time for software products is usually large, followed by a maintenance warranty, and then a rest period before starting over.

Unknown consumption habits. Once products are released, is hard to know how they’re consumed by users, and take decisions based on usage patterns.

On time, on budget. Most important priority is to release products on time and on budget.

In addition, as with traditional manufactured products, reliability is perceived from the perspective of each individual unit. Providing reliability requires controlling quality within the production process. When users experience product problems, they are usually willing to wait until office hours for their problem to be addressed. A problem rarely impacts more than one person at a time. And usually it’s clear for users when problems are due to issues in the software product, as opposed to issues in the environment in which the software runs.

But any of these businesses might be affected by today’s transformation on software demands:

Your company develops an mobile software application, it can be a line-of-business application in the enterprises world, or it can be another specific-purpose software application in the marketplace for the consumers world. In the second case, most of these applications at least do store some data or do some kind of processing in a remote back-end, which puts them in the same group as those in the first case: mobile applications that consumes remote services.

Your company does electronic business with other companies, it can be exposing internal processes through software where others can participate, or use software applications to exchange information in order to complete a transaction. One way or another you are either providing software based services, or consuming them; probably both.

Did you notice the word software at the beginning of the two previous sentences and the word service at the end? It is not casual –I wrote it that way- but that is what we are and will be seeing in the foreseeable future: mobile software applications that consumes some kind of remote service and software based services exposed for others to consume.

If you feel that any of the two before mentioned categories do apply to your company, either if you are creating software for your own business consumption or in the business of developing software for others to use, and you are still developing software as products, guest what?You are not developing software, you are providing services. I do call these software-based service providers. And that is a completely different beast, want to know why? Let us see:

Reliability and agility over features. Differentiation of the service is based on highly reliable capabilities that fit a specific set of market needs. Effective services emphasizes reliability and agility over features.

Mean time to resolution. As with traditional utility services, its focus is mean-time-to-recovery: failures will happen, so services are better because of its fast recovery.

Continuous updates, continuous development. Software updates are continuous; they might release new features or entire new versions very frequently, and fix bugs on a daily basis. Software development for services is usually continuous; they might have release cycles, but usually those cycles are very short.

Detailed usage patterns. Usually it’s possible to collect very accurate and huge amounts of usage data, driving more meaningful decisions.

Up and running at appropriate costs. Most important priority is to have the service up and running, keeping the appropriate operating cost.

Furthermore, as with traditional utility services, reliability is a function of the entire system. Providing reliability requires real time, proactive monitoring of the behavior of every system component. When users suffer service outages, the impact is much wider, with one problem impacting a wide array of customers. Response cannot wait for office hours. Product support has to be ready 24x7x365. Users don’t care where the issues are when service outages occur. They might be in the software the service is based on, or in the datacenter, or in the network, or in any of the dependent components

You cannot keep pace with change requests and do not have enough agility to accompany businesses transformations? You have conflicting requirements from different business units or different users groups? You cannot find a good way to organize your software development and software operations teams? Guess what, your software factory is probably not organized as a service provider needs to be organized.

Software factories are organized around software products while service providers are organized around services. And you still wonder why it did not work?

Organizing teams around products means two things. One: you have a team by product, some members can be shared among teams, but teams do work for a product. And two: you very probably have segregation of tasks inside teams: business analyst, architects, designers, developers, testers, and operators if you do run your own software. Does one product use others? Of course, except if you have monolithic giant piece of software, in which case you are way worst that the rest of us, and have more urgent and important problems to solve. Each of the roles of a product team I mentioned before, does work for their own product. They really do not care about products using theirs products and certainly they do not control the other products they consume. And the transition from development to operations looks like developers throwing something over a fence to operators to catch… who cares what happens in the other side? There is always a revenge, operators can always fill bug fix request to developers.

Organizing teams around services, means that a service team has everything it needs to deliver the service and fulfill the service level agreement. There is no fence. Service owner, business analysts, developers, testers and operators sits together upfront to define how the service itself, and the service development process, will look like, end-to-end. Radical, isn’t it? Yes, but that is what you need: An operator telling a software developer what kind of automated deployment, monitoring and telemetry capacities he will need in order to operate the service. These are non-functional requirements and architects and software developers are used to deal with them. A tester telling a software development the way he or she should design the software for him or her to being able to effective and efficiently testing it. These are non-functional requirements too. A software architect or developer telling the service owner what can or cannot be built given time and budget restrictions. Sounds crazy, but these examples are just business requirements, the service owner should be used to deal with them during service definition.

If you think that services are just on the outer layer in contact with the outside world, you are plain wrong. The very same concept can be used in inner layers, in what I love to call the service-oriented enterprise architecture. It is not the same as the plain old service oriented architecture, where application services was the cornerstone. I am talking about business services, application services, and infrastructure services, all organized in the same way, relying one on each other via well defined operation level agreements from the service consumer side, and service level agreements as part of clear service definition from the service provider side.

Biggest software companies (well, it depends on your definition of big) are in fact software-based service providers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsup, Apple, and so on). Your company might not be as big as those, but if it is a software-based service provider, you might have more things in common with them that you think. Someway or another all of them do organize behind the services they do provide. Why you do not?

In a previous post I wrote about how to configure your laptop to act alternatively as a virtualization server or as a nearly-standard desktop. Why would you do that? Well, if you need to use 64 bits virtual machines on top of Microsoft’s virtualization solutions, your only choice is to run Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. For example, if you need to have different SharePoint 2010 developing environment configurations on the same machine, you will need to use 64 bits virtual machines.

In that post I shown how to configure an hypervisor server operating system –specifically Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V– to behave almost the same as desktop operating system –let us say Windows 7–, by enabling the features that ship disabled by default: wireless networking, audio, Aero, hibernation, and so on. Even better, since you probably want to switch between the hypervisor server scenario back and forth to the desktop scenario, I included some scripts files to enable required services and disable non-needed ones in each one case.

Even if you can successfully run both 32 bits and 64 bits virtual machines on your laptop when Hyper-V is properly configured, provided you have the appropriate hardware resources, you will realize sooner or later that Hyper-V is designed to run on a physical server, not on a laptop. Let me give you an example: Why do you use a laptop, after all? For mobile computing, don’t you? Well, if you do mobile computing with your laptop, you will be connected wirelessly, at least occasionally. Then you will realize you cannot connect your virtual machines to the Internet by using a wireless connection: Hyper-V only shows Ethernet network adapters when creating external virtual connections.

I have two network interface cards in my laptop, an Intel® 82567LM-3 Gigabit Network Connection, and an Intel® Centrino® Ultimate-N 6300 AGN:

But only the first one is available in the list of network cards to be used when creating an external virtual connection:

There is an easy way to workaround this, and get an external virtual network connected with a wireless connection:

Configure an external virtual connection using your wired local area connection as usual. Your virtual machines use this connection when you are connected by wire to access the Internet.

When you are not connected by wire, bridge your wireless connection with the external virtual connection, by selecting both connections in the Network Connections window, right clicking, and choosing Bridge Connections from the context menu.

Your will see an additional network connection named Network Bridge and you will be able to access the Internet from your virtual machine guests through the wireless connection. Delete the bridged connection when you get connected by wire again.

Since you probably do not need to be permanently connected to the Internet, but want to access your host’s files and folders, I usually configure an internal virtual connection in addition to the external one, and all my virtual machines have two virtual network adapters connected to each of them.

If you are in the same scenario than me, I hope this tip simplifies your life. Cheers.

Microsoft yesterday published for download the March 2011 release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. You can download the kit from here. This training kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos, covering the latest topics in the recently updated versions of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Enjoy.

If you usually develop SharePoint Server 2010 solutions from your office desktop, it is very likely that you have a full sized server there, with all required servers and tools installed on it, or better yet if you use different server versions or configurations, you have multiple virtual machines, each one with all required software installed on it. In such case, this blog post is not for you.

If your scenario is different, as mine is, and you work from different places using a laptop, and need to have different SharePoint Server 2010 installations (different versions, different languages, etc.), then you need your servers and tools running on virtual machines.

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, both your host and your guest operating systems could be 32 bits, since you were able to use the 32 bits version of SharePoint servers. In addition, it was possible to use a client (non-server) operating system as host, by using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for example. With SharePoint Server 2010 that is not true anymore and the guest operating system needs to be a 64 bits one, let us say Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bits. This is because SharePoint Server 2010 only runs on top of 64 bits operating system.

You cannot have any 64 bits operating system on a virtual machine by using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or the new Windows 7’s Windows Virtual PC; the only way you can virtualize a 64 bits operating system is by using a hypervisor: Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role.

Does it look a bit odd to run a hypervisor on a laptop, does not? Well, probably you are right, but you will get accustomed to it, believe me.

What do you lose by using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V as the host operating system of your laptop? If you use the default installation, you do not have:

Audio and Windows Media Player. The Windows Audio service is disabled by default and the Windows Media Player is not installed in a server. Usually there is nobody listening music at the servers room, it is a very noisy environment.

Wi-Fi connectivity. The Wireless LAN Service feature is not installed. Usually servers a wired-connected to the network.

Aero. The Themes service is disabled by default to preserve server’s resources.

Search. The Windows Search service is disabled by default also to preserve server’s resources.

Sleep and hibernate. Usually servers are always on and never sleep or hibernate, even turn off.

Event Tracker. You cannot shut down the system without explaining the reason why first.

Internet Explorer’s Enhanced Security. Every time you try to visit a website you get a message saying why you should not browse the web from a server.

But what is reasonable in a server, is not reasonable in the laptop you use for your everyday work, right? You want to hear music, you need wireless connections, you need to search for files and email messages, you love the look and feel of Aero, and you do not carry your laptop with the hard disk drive spinning every time you move from one place to another.

Except for sleeping and hibernating, you can have audio, wireless connectivity, file and email search, and a desktop look and feel in Windows Server 2008 R2. Unfortunately, as soon as you add the Hyper‑V role, you lose the ability to sleep/hibernate your laptop. But news are no so bad, you will be able to sleep/hibernate your laptop by temporarily disabling the hypervisor without removing it.

In this blog post I will show you how to tweak a default Windows Server 2008 R2 installation so it looks and behaves like a Windows 7 desktop. This is how mine looks:

Enabling audio

This one is easy. Simply click the Start button and type “services” in the search box and then open the Services console. Look for the Windows Audio service, right click and choose Properties, then in the Properties dialog box change the Start type from Disabled to Automatic.

Or open an administrative Command Prompt and type sc \\[machine] config audiosrv start= auto replacing [machine] for your computer’s name and then type net start audiosrv.

Enabling Wi-Fi, Aero and Search

Install the missing features. Click the Start button and type “server” in the search box and then open the Server Manager console. On the left panel click on Features, then click on the Add Features link on the right panel. In the Add Features Wizard select and install the features Desktop Experience and Wireless LAN Service.

Once these features are installed, open the Services console again and look for the Themes service, right click and choose Properties, then in the Properties dialog box change the Start type from Disabled to Automatic. Do the same with the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager service. Do the same also with the Windows Search service but set Start type to Automatic (Delayed start).

Or open an administrative Command Prompt and type for %%s in (uxsms themes) do (sc \\[machine] config %%s start= auto) and then sc \\[machine] config wsearch start= auto and finally for %%s in (uxsms themes wsearch) do (net start %%s).

Enabling sleep/hibernate

Let us assume you have installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and then you added the Hyper-V role. If you open an administrative Command Prompt and then you run the bcdedit /enum {current} you will get an output like this one:

bcdedit is not a “binary coded decimal” editor, as you might probably guess, but a “boot configuration datastore” editor. Note the hypervisorlaunchtype set to Auto in the last line. Also note the Windows Server 2008 R2 description; this is the text you see during boot when multiple boot configurations are available or during system recovery.

Copy this boot configuration to a new one by typing bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (w/o Hyper-V)” in an administrative Command Prompt. The text between the quotes is the description of the new boot configuration. You can choose a description different than mine.

The command outputs a message including a GUID of the new boot configuration. Disable the hypervisor role in the new boot configuration by using bcdedit /set {GUID} hypervisorlaunchtype off where GUID is the GUID shown by the previous command.

You are done. Additionally, if you want to change your default boot configuration, or change the time to display the list of configurations during boot, you can use bcdedit or the Startup and Recovery dialog box in the System Properties.

This new boot configuration will disable Hyper-V and let you enable sleep/hibernation, but (obviously) you will need to reboot your laptop before that. This is by far more efficient than completely removing the Hyper-V role, which by the way, also requires a reboot.

To enable hibernation after reboot, you will need to open an administrative Command Prompt and run powercfg –H (uppercase haitch).

Disabling Event Tracking

Open the Local Group Policy Editor by clicking on Start and typing “edit policy” in the search box. Then expand Local Computer Policy in the left pane, then Computer Configuration, then Administrative Templates, finally System. In the right pane look for Display Shutdown Event Tracker, double click it to edit its configuration, and choose Disable.

Disabling Internet Explorer Enhanced Security

Click the Start button and then type “server” in the search box and then open the Server Manager console. Select the root node in the left tree and then click on the Configure IE ESC link in the right pane. Choose Off to disable the setting.

Final remarks

Now you can use your laptop in two scenarios: as a hypervisor or as a regular laptop. In the first scenario, is highly recommended that you disable back services like Windows Audio, Themes, Windows Search, etc. and turn Aero themes off, in order to preserve system resources. In addition, if you have other servers like SQL Server or even a SharePoint server installed on top of your host operating system, it is highly recommended to turn them off while using the hypervisor.

Since you need to shut down the system before moving your laptop while using the hypervisor, and since you need to reboot to switch from one scenario to the other, consider buying a solid state disk drive for your system partition to speed up shut down and start up times. By the way, with a disk like that, turning your laptop off and on could be even faster than hibernating and restoring from a regular hard disk drive, if your laptop has a lot of RAM, as it should have to use eventually multiple virtual machines simultaneously.

To facilitate switching from the hypervisor scenario to the regular laptop scenario, you can use the following batch files and scripts.

Use this batch file to enable or disable search by simply typing search on or search off in an administrative Command Prompt. This batch file not only stops or starts the search service; it also enables or disables it, so the current status is kept after rebooting.

To stop all servers’ services, there is another batch file you can use to stop and disable or start and enable these services, by typing servermode off or server mode on on an administrative Command Prompt.

Since I do a lot of work with many different servers (SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Team Foundation Server, etc.), the list of services I have in this batch file is big. You can remove or add your own services from the batch file. If you plan to modify it, pay attention to the following:

1. Dependencies. You need to stop a services after all the services that depends on it, to avoid confirmation messages stopping your batch file processing. Make sure your start them in the reverse order.

2. Start type. Disabling services is easy: there is just one disabled status. But enabling them is a bit more complicated, because there is more than one start type: automatic, automatic but delayed, and manual. Make sure you return the start type to the original one.

The extra mile: if you want your Windows Server 2008 R2 installation to look exactly (well, very similar at least) than a Windows 7 desktop, with Aero and themes, you can use these additional batch files and scripts. You bet it, there are desktopmode on and desktopmode off commands to do this.

One final recommendation: add the folder where this batch files and scripts are stored to the PATH environment variable.

Have fun.

PS: In order to be completely honest, there are other things you will lose if you choose to install Windows Server 2008 R2 in your laptop. First, the Bluetooth drivers are usually not available for server operating systems, so be aware if you depend on Bluetooth devices for your daily work. Second, depending on your system’s hardware, other device drivers might not be available for server operating systems. The most common ones are the fingerprint reader and the smart card reader drivers. You can try installing the drivers for Windows 7, but this may or may not work. Finally, some third party tools detect a non-desktop operating system and refuse to run or even to install. So far, I can live with all these limitations, but you cannot say I did not tell you.